Scanning negatives basic info

C

Carlsen Highway

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I am going to ask what is probably an absurdly simple question here, but scanning negatives is entirely new to me....

If I take a roll of black and white negatives down to the photo shop and ask them to scan them, what parameters should I ask for to get a decent result for general viewing on the computer monitor? (They will do anything I ask them)
If I ask for 300 dpi and a size of 6x4 will that do? I am looking at some of the quality you guys are getting in your galleries on this site, which is very good.

On the other hand if I wanted to print the image 8x10 size digitally (For example) and have it come out well (This is 35mm negs) if I ask for 600 dpi and a size of 8x12....

What constitutes a reasonable level of resolution I suppose is my actual question.

It has come about because the first photoshop I went to scanned my first roll at 72 dpi and then printed them from that, and quite frankly they were the worst prints I have ever seen, and I had to tell them that, so now it seems I have to learn something new...so I know what to ask for.
 
Hi,

The pictures in the gallery here are no reference whatsoever for resolution. I usually upload at 720x480 pixels, at 300 dpi that would be a size 2 1/2" x 1 3/4".

I'd like to have a lab that does anything I ask them. A question of price, I guess.

Resolution is a bad metric actually. When a shop tells you "300 dpi at 6x4" what they actually want to tell you is that you're getting 1800x1200 pixels. Which is nice, but not a lot. However, the "resolution" figure they tell you is not the resolution of the scan. A 24x36mm is about 1 inch high, so if you want to get 1200 pixels of image height out of that it means they scan at 1200 dpi. There's no way you can scan a negative at 72 dpi, because you'd get an image of about 100x70 pixels. My lab now gives me scans of 3360x2240 pixels, which in your metric would be 300 dpi at 7 1/2 x 11 or so, but which technically is a scan of the 24x36mm negative at about 2200 dpi. That's for 10 EUR for a roll of 38 pictures, including development.

Their "72 dpi" or "300 dpi" is a figure for a hypothetical print you might make out of that picture. So the stuff they scan is supposedly good enough for printing 6x4 at 300dpi resolution. 72dpi looks blocky, but 300dpi is more than the eyes of most of us can discern (well, in a colour print from an electronic minilab anyway). So if you want to print 8x10s then scanning for (not at) 300dpi/8x10" should be OK. You'd get something in the ballpark of the figure I quoted for my lab.

That said, if you want to do some image processing, enhancement etc. on your images and put them through Photoshop, there's nothing that replaces having your source material in good resolution.

Philipp
 
2400 dpi should be all right. As Philipp has explained, many shops may not know this. When I asked about resolution at one, I got the answer, "Eight by ten, Sir".
 
That said, just today I received a used Nikon LS-4000ED film scanner. I just scanned the first negative and am now looking at a 5709x3828 pixel 4000dpi scan, the 300dpi equivalent of a 19x13" print. It's better in almost every respect than even the scans from a professional minilab that I'm used to - resolution, colour, flexibility. I am quite blown away. And it scans whole rolls of film in an hour and a half or so.

This is an entirely different kind of workflow. In terms of photography it probably makes more of a difference than a new camera body. I don't have a darkroom here, but now I can go back to developing my own B&W and getting it scanned myself.
 
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